Epicurus — "The wise man is not perturbed by the most disturbing things."
The wise man is not perturbed by the most disturbing things.
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More from Epicurus
"Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensation, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us."
"Pleasure is the beginning and the end of the blessed life."
"The greatest disturbance of the soul is not pain, but the fear of pain."
"The wise man is happy even in torture."
"The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When that point is attained, pleasure does not further increase, but only varies in kind."
About Epicurus (341-270 BCE)
Greek philosopher who founded the Garden school in Athens, whose materialist atomism and pleasure-as-tranquility ethics shaped Hellenistic thought. Closely associated with Lucretius (Roman successor whose De Rerum Natura preserved Epicurean physics). For an intellectual contrast, see the Stoics (Zeno, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), the Hellenistic ethical school of discipline-of-acceptance — Stoic 'live according to nature' and Epicurean 'pleasure and absence of pain' framed every ancient ethical decision — every Roman of Cicero's era was implicitly choosing one path or the other. The Stoic-Epicurean rivalry was the central philosophical debate of the Hellenistic and Roman world for 400 years.
The standard scholarly entry points to Epicurus's work: A.A. Long (UC Berkeley, Classics) — Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (1974); Tim O'Keefe (Georgia State University, ancient philosophy) — Epicureanism (2010); David Sedley (Cambridge, Classics) — Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (1998). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Epicurus.